Topic: Nike

Future basketball hall-of-famer Kobe Bryant is planning for life beyond the court, and takes it upon himself to cold-call some of the smartest minds in business for advice. Among those he's spoken with is Apple's famed chief designer Jony Ive.

In an interview on Friday, Nike CEO Mark Parker said his company is not giving up on its "digital sport" initiative with the apparent demise of FuelBand and will instead pursue expansion of the NikeFuel ecosystem through high-profile partners like Apple.

Nike on Thursday announced plans to allow fitness app developers to funnel users' activity into its NikeFuel measurement system -- in hopes of creating a universal standard for activity tracking across platforms - and backed the initiative with a new San Francisco-based development laboratory.

Nike has allegedly lost one of its top designers, as the director of the shoe and apparel company's research and development studio, responsible for the FuelBand fitness tracker, has reportedly left Beaverton for Cupertino.

Apple's inclusion of a motion coprocessor in the iPhone 5s will likely spawn a whole new generation of intuitive, user-friendly fitness apps, and may indicate where the company's future devices and services are headed.

Nike on Sunday revealed that it is not working on bringing its iOS-exclusive Nike+ FuelBand fitness monitoring app to Google's Android platform, disappointing some Android fans and seemingly reversing a position the company took last year.